Literature Quotes

"I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn't want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor's salary"

George Woodcock, Writer

"In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature"

Patrick White, Author

"People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater"

Minnie Maddern Fiske, Actress

"I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate"

Marguerite Duras, Novelist

"Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated"

Thomas Bulfinch, Writer

"I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

"In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read"

S. I. Hayakawa, Politician

"Let philosophy resolutely aim to be as scientific as possible, but let her not forget her strong kinship with literature"

Morris Raphael Cohen, Philosopher

"Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist"

Morris Raphael Cohen, Philosopher

"The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive"

Lionel Trilling, Critic

"Again, both literature and philosophy work by appealing to certain reigning idols"

Morris Raphael Cohen, Philosopher

"It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature"

John Drinkwater, Poet

"Here, you can walk into a bookstore and pick up a Bible or Christian literature and learn. Over there, they are lucky if they have one Bible for a whole village"

Michael Scott

"In thus pointing out certain respects in which philosophy resembles literature more than science, I do not mean, of course, to imply that it would be well for philosophy if it ceased to aim at scientific rigor"

Morris Raphael Cohen, Philosopher

"The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature"

Sol LeWitt, Artist

"For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness"

Thomas Bulfinch, Writer

"Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world"

John Cheever, Writer

"There are two methods for the literary study of any book - the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view"

Lafcadio Hearn, Author

"It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese"

Lafcadio Hearn, Author

"I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature"

Kenneth Koch, Poet

"There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society"

Irvine Welsh, Novelist

"Literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist"

Morris Raphael Cohen, Philosopher

"I also really liked playing Mr. Tumnus in 'Narnia'. I got to play my favorite character in children's literature, which I loved. You don't get the chance to do that in other jobs"

James McAvoy, Actor

"Bad literature is a form of treason"

Joseph Brodsky, Poet

"Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures"

Michael Novak, Philosopher

"The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature"

Lafcadio Hearn, Author

"I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry"

Lafcadio Hearn, Author

"Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change"

Lafcadio Hearn, Author

"For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete"

Lafcadio Hearn, Author

"It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race"

Lafcadio Hearn, Author

"I wish to share and pass down some of my generation's traits, and encourage young people to create their own art, music, and literature"

David Amram, Composer

"The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they'll write what they feel"

Irvine Welsh, Novelist

"To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is"

David McCullough, Historian

"There are, it is true, at present no great prizes in literature such as are offered by the learned professions, but there are quite as many small ones - competences; while, on the other hand, it is not so much of a lottery"

James Payn, Novelist

"Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on"

Harrison Salisbury, Journalist

"One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name"

George Saintsbury, Writer

"I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature"

David Eddings, Author

"Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty"

Herbert Gold, Author

"Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds"

Felix Adler, Educator

"Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics"

David Amram, Composer

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